Search Results: "ema"

15 July 2015

Matthew Garrett: Canonical's Ubuntu IP policy is garbage

(In order to avoid any ambiguity here, this is a personal opinion. The Free Software Foundation's opinion on this matter is here)

Canonical have a legal policy surrounding reuse of Intellectual Property they own in Ubuntu, and you can find it here. It's recently been modified to handle concerns raised by various people including the Free Software Foundation[1], who have some further opinions on the matter here. The net outcome is that Canonical made it explicit that if the license a piece of software is under explicitly says you can do something, you can do that even if the Ubuntu IP policy would otherwise forbid it.

Unfortunately, "Canonical have made it explicit that they're not attempting to violate the GPL" is about the nicest thing you can say about this. The most troubling statement is Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries.. The apparent aim here is to avoid situations where people take Ubuntu, modify it and continue to pass it off as Ubuntu. But it reaches far further than that. Cases where this may apply include (but are not limited to):
In each of these cases, a strict reading of the policy indicates that you are distributing a modified version of Ubuntu and therefore must either get it approved by Canonical or remove the trademarks and rebuild everything. The strange thing is that this doesn't limit itself to rebuilding packages that include Canonical's trademarks - there's a requirement that you rebuild all binaries.

Now obviously this is good engineering practice in a whole bunch of ways, but it's a huge pain in the ass. And to make things worse, Canonical won't clarify what they consider to be use of their trademarks. Many Ubuntu packages rebuilt from Debian include the word "ubuntu" in their version string. Many Ubuntu packages will contain the word "ubuntu" in maintainer email addresses. Many Ubuntu packages include references to Ubuntu (for instance, documentation might say "This configuration file is located under /etc/default in Debian and Ubuntu"). And many Ubuntu packages will include the compiler version string, which will include the word "ubuntu". Realistically, there's no risk of confusion by using the trademarks in this way, and as a consequence there would be no infringement under trademark law. But Canonical aren't using trademark law here. Canonical assert that they hold copyright over binaries that they have built form source, and require that for you to have permission to redistribute these binaries under copyright law you must remove the trademarks. This means that it doesn't matter whether your use of the trademarks would be infringing or not - you're required to remove them, because fuck you that's why.

This is a huge overreach. It's hostile to free software, in that it makes it significantly more difficult to produce derivative works of Ubuntu and doesn't benefit the community in the process. It's hostile to our understanding of IP law, in that it claims that the mechanical process of turning source code into binaries creates an independently copyrightable work. And in some cases it may make it impossible to create derivative works that interoperate with Ubuntu due to applications making assumptions about the presence of strings.

It'd be easy write this off as an over the top misinterpretation of the policy if it hadn't been confirmed by the Ubuntu Community Manager that any binaries shipped by Ubuntu under licenses that don't grant an explicit right to redistribute the binaries can't be redistributed without permission or rebuilding. When I asked for clarification from Canonical over a year ago, I got no response[2]. Perhaps Canonical don't want to force you to remove every single use of the word Ubuntu from derivative works, but their policy is written such that the natural reading is that they do, and they've refused every single opportunity they've been given to clarify the point.

So, we're left with a policy that makes it hugely impractical to redistribute modified versions of Ubuntu unless Canonical approve of it. That's not freedom, and it's certainly not Ubuntu. If Canonical are serious about participating in the free software community then they need to demonstrate their willingness to continue improving this policy to bring it closer to our goals. Failure to do so will give a strong indication of their priorities.

[1] While I'm a member of the FSF's board of directors, I'm not involved in the majority of the FSF's day to day activities and was not part of this process
[2] Nebula's OS was a mixture of binary packages we pulled straight from Ubuntu and packages we rebuilt, so we were obviously pretty interested in what the answer was

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12 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 11 in Stretch cycle

Debian is undertaking a huge effort to develop a reproducible builds system. I'd like to thank you for that. This could be Debian's most important project, with how badly computer security has been going.

PerniciousPunk in Reddit's Ask me anything! to Neil McGovern, DPL. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes More tools are getting patched to use the value of the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable as the current time:

In the reproducible experimental toolchain which have been uploaded: Johannes Schauer followed up on making sbuild build path deterministic with several ideas. Packages fixed The following 311 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies : 4ti2, alot, angband, appstream-glib, argvalidate, armada-backlight, ascii, ask, astroquery, atheist, aubio, autorevision, awesome-extra, bibtool, boot-info-script, bpython, brian, btrfs-tools, bugs-everywhere, capnproto, cbm, ccfits, cddlib, cflow, cfourcc, cgit, chaussette, checkbox-ng, cinnamon-settings-daemon, clfswm, clipper, compton, cppcheck, crmsh, cupt, cutechess, d-itg, dahdi-tools, dapl, darnwdl, dbusada, debian-security-support, debomatic, dime, dipy, dnsruby, doctrine, drmips, dsc-statistics, dune-common, dune-istl, dune-localfunctions, easytag, ent, epr-api, esajpip, eyed3, fastjet, fatresize, fflas-ffpack, flann, flex, flint, fltk1.3, fonts-dustin, fonts-play, fonts-uralic, freecontact, freedoom, gap-guava, gap-scscp, genometools, geogebra, git-reintegrate, git-remote-bzr, git-remote-hg, gitmagic, givaro, gnash, gocr, gorm.app, gprbuild, grapefruit, greed, gtkspellmm, gummiboot, gyp, heat-cfntools, herold, htp, httpfs2, i3status, imagetooth, imapcopy, imaprowl, irker, jansson, jmapviewer, jsdoc-toolkit, jwm, katarakt, khronos-opencl-man, khronos-opengl-man4, lastpass-cli, lava-coordinator, lava-tool, lavapdu, letterize, lhapdf, libam7xxx, libburn, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libdaemon, libdbusmenu-qt, libdc0, libevhtp, libexosip2, libfreenect, libgwenhywfar, libhmsbeagle, libitpp, libldm, libmodbus, libmtp, libmwaw, libnfo, libpam-abl, libphysfs, libplayer, libqb, libsecret, libserial, libsidplayfp, libtime-y2038-perl, libxr, lift, linbox, linthesia, livestreamer, lizardfs, lmdb, log4c, logbook, lrslib, lvtk, m-tx, mailman-api, matroxset, miniupnpd, mknbi, monkeysign, mpi4py, mpmath, mpqc, mpris-remote, musicbrainzngs, network-manager, nifticlib, obfsproxy, ogre-1.9, opal, openchange, opensc, packaging-tutorial, padevchooser, pajeng, paprefs, pavumeter, pcl, pdmenu, pepper, perroquet, pgrouting, pixz, pngcheck, po4a, powerline, probabel, profitbricks-client, prosody, pstreams, pyacidobasic, pyepr, pymilter, pytest, python-amqp, python-apt, python-carrot, python-django, python-ethtool, python-mock, python-odf, python-pathtools, python-pskc, python-psutil, python-pypump, python-repoze.tm2, python-repoze.what, qdjango, qpid-proton, qsapecng, radare2, reclass, repsnapper, resource-agents, rgain, rttool, ruby-aggregate, ruby-albino, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bcat, ruby-blankslate, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-colored, ruby-dbd-mysql, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-dbd-sqlite3, ruby-dbi, ruby-dirty-memoize, ruby-encryptor, ruby-erubis, ruby-fast-xs, ruby-fusefs, ruby-gd, ruby-git, ruby-globalhotkeys, ruby-god, ruby-hike, ruby-hmac, ruby-integration, ruby-jnunemaker-matchy, ruby-memoize, ruby-merb-core, ruby-merb-haml, ruby-merb-helpers, ruby-metaid, ruby-mina, ruby-net-irc, ruby-net-netrc, ruby-odbc, ruby-ole, ruby-packet, ruby-parseconfig, ruby-platform, ruby-plist, ruby-popen4, ruby-rchardet, ruby-romkan, ruby-ronn, ruby-rubyforge, ruby-rubytorrent, ruby-samuel, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-sourcify, ruby-test-spec, ruby-validatable, ruby-wirble, ruby-xml-simple, ruby-zoom, rumor, rurple-ng, ryu, sam2p, scikit-learn, serd, shellex, shorewall-doc, shunit2, simbody, simplejson, smcroute, soqt, sord, spacezero, spamassassin-heatu, spamprobe, sphinxcontrib-youtube, splitpatch, sratom, stompserver, syncevolution, tgt, ticgit, tinyproxy, tor, tox, transmissionrpc, tweeper, udpcast, units-filter, viennacl, visp, vite, vmfs-tools, waffle, waitress, wavtool-pl, webkit2pdf, wfmath, wit, wreport, x11proto-input, xbae, xdg-utils, xdotool, xsystem35, yapsy, yaz. Please note that some packages in the above list are falsely reproducible. In the experimental toolchain, debhelper exported TZ=UTC and this made packages capturing the current date (without the time) reproducible in the current test environment. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Ben Hutchings upstreamed several patches to fix Linux reproducibility issues which were quickly merged. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Uploads that should fix packages not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new package set has been added for lua maintainers. (h01ger) tracker.debian.org now only shows reproducibility issues for unstable. Holger and Mattia worked on several bugfixes and enhancements: finished initial test setup for NetBSD, rewriting more shell scripts in Python, saving UDD requests, and more debbindiff development Reiner Herrmann fixed text comparison of files with different encoding. Documentation update Juan Picca added to the commands needed for a local test chroot installation of the locales-all package. Package reviews 286 obsolete reviews have been removed, 278 added and 243 updated this week. 43 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been filled by Chris West (Faux), Mattia Rizzolo, and h01ger. The following new issues have been added: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_ronn, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode, and timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_matplotlib. Misc. Reiner Herrmann has submitted patches for OpenWrt. Chris Lamb cleaned up some code and removed cruft in the misc.git repository. Mattia Rizzolo updated the prebuilder script to match what is currently done on reproducible.debian.net.

10 July 2015

Chris Lamb: Where's the principled opposition to the "WhatsApp ban"?

The Independent reports that David Cameron wishes to ban the instant messaging application WhatsApp due its use of end-to-end encryption. That we might merely be pawns in manoeuvring for some future political compromise (or merely susceptible to cheap clickbait) should be cause for some concern, but what should worry us more is that if it takes scare stories about WhatsApp for our culture to awaken on the issues of privacy and civil liberties, then the central argument against surveillance was lost a long time ago. However, the situation worsens once you analyse the disapproval in more detail. One is immediately struck by a predominant narrative of technical considerations; a ban would be "unworkable" or "impractical". A robust defence of personal liberty or a warning about the insidious nature of chilling effects? Perhaps a prescient John Locke quote to underscore the case? No. An encryption ban would "cause security problems." The argument proceeds in a tediously predictable fashion: it was already difficult to keep track whether one should ipso facto be in favour of measures that benefit the economy, but we are suddenly co-opted as technocrats to consider the "damage" it could to do the recovery or the impact on a now-victimised financial sector. The coup-de-gr ce finally appeals to our already inflated self-regard and narcissism: someone could "steal your identity." Perhaps even more disappointing is the reaction from more technically-minded circles who, frankly, should know better. Here, they give the outward impression of metaphorically stockpiling copies of the GnuPG source code in their bunkers, perhaps believing the shallow techno-utopianist worldview that all social and cultural problems can probably be solved with Twitter and a JavaScript intepreter. The tragedy here is that I suspect that this isn't what the vast majority of people really believe. Given a hypothetical ban that could, somehow, bypass all of the stated concerns, I'm pretty upbeat and confident that most people would remain uncomfortable with it on some level. So what, exactly, does it take for us to oppose this kind of intervention on enduring principled grounds instead of transient and circumventable practical ones? Is the problem just a lack of vocabulary to discuss these issues on a social scale? A lack of courage? Whilst it's certainly easier to dissect illiberal measures on technical merit than to make an impassioned case for abstract freedoms, every time we gleefully cackle "it won't work" we are, in essence, conceding the central argument to the authoritarian and the censorious. If one is right but for the wrong reasons, were we even right to begin with?

Joey Hess: our beautiful fake histories

Here's an odd thing about the git bisect command: It has only 1 option (--no-checkout). Compare with eg git commit, which has 36 options by my count. The difference is largely down to git having a pervasive culture of carefully edited history. We need lots of git commit options to carefully produce commits that look Just Right. Staging only some of the files we've edited, perhaps even staging only some of the changes within a file. Amend that commit if we notice we made a mistake. Create a whole series of beautiful commits, and use rebase later to remix them into a more beautiful whole. Beautiful fake histories. Because coding is actually messy; our actual edit history contains blind alleys and doublings back on itself; contains periods of many days the code isn't building properly. We want to sweep that complexity away, hide it under the rug. This works well except when it doesn't, when some detail airbrushed out of the only remaining history turns out to be important. Once we have these beautiful fake histories of changes, we can easily bisect them and find the commit that introduced a bug. So bisect doesn't need a lot of options to control how it works. I'd like to suggest a new option though. At least as a thought experiment. --merges-only would make bisect only check the merge commits in the range of commits being bisected. The bisection would result in not a single commit, but in the set of commits between two merges. I suspect this would be useful for faster bisecting some histories of the beautiful fake kind. But I know it would be useful when the history is messy and organic and full of false starts and points where the code doesn't build. Merges, in such histories, are often the points where things reach a certian level of beauty, where that messy feature branch got to the point it all built again (please let this happen today) and was merged into master. Bisecting such points in a messy organic history should work about as well as bisecting carefully gardened histories. I think I'll save the full rant about beautiful fake history vs messy real history for some other day. Or maybe I've already ranted that rant here before, I can't remember. Let's just say that I personally come down on the side of liking my git history to reflect the actual code I was working on, even if it was broken and even if I threw it away later. I've indeed taken this to extreme lengths with propellor; in its git history you can see every time I've ever run it, and the version of my config file and code at that point. Apologies to anyone who's been put off by that... But oddly, propellor gets by far more contributions from others than any of my other haskell programs. All in the form of beaufiully constructed commits, naturally.

Gunnar Wolf: Finishing the course on "Free Software and Open Standards"

A couple of months ago, I was invited to give the starting course for the Masters degree in Free Software in the Universidad Andina Sim n Bol var university. UASB is a multinational university, with campuses in (at least) Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia; I was doubtful at first regarding the seriousness of this proposal and the viability of the program, but time made my doubts disappear. Bolivia is going through an interesting process, as they have one of the strongest worded government mandates for migration to free software for the public administration in the next couple of years; this migration has prompted the interest of many professionals in the country. In particular, we have over 40 registered people for this Masters degree. Studying a Masters degree is a long-term commitment which signifies a big time investment, and although many of the student are quite new to the idea of free software, they are willing to spend this time (and money, as the university is privately owned and charges for its enrollment). I gave this class together with Alejandro Miranda (a.k.a. @pooka), as we have a very good pair-teaching dynamics; we had already given many conferences together, but this is the first time we had the opportunity to share a whole course and the experience was very good. We have read the students' logs, and many of them clearly agree with this. I had to skip two of the (ten) lessons, as I travelled from Mexico to Argentina halfway through it (of course, we brought the babies to meet my wife's family and friends!), so we had also the honor of having Esteban Lima fill in for those sessions. I am very happy and grateful that the University took care to record our presentations and intend to record and put online all of the classes; as we were the first in the program, there were some understandable hiccups and some sessions were lost, but most are available. Here they are, in case you are interested in refering to them:
Topic Video (my server) Video (Youtube)
Introduction to free software Watch Watch
History Watch Watch
Free culture N/A N/A
The effects of free software Watch Watch
Free software and open standards related to technologic soverignity Watch Watch
The free software ecosystem Watch Watch
Free software implementation in Bolivia Watch Watch
Introduction to intelectual property: Copyright, patents, trademarks, etc. Watch Watch
Who is "the community" and why do we speak about it? Watch Watch
Current status and challenges for the movement N/A N/A
We have yet another video file (which I have not fully followed through) titled ADSIB - Migration plan. It can also be downloaded from my server or watched online at Youtube. All in all: This was a great opportunity and a joy to do. I think the material we used and developed fit well what was expected from us, and we had fun giving somewhat heterodox readings on our movement.

8 July 2015

Lars Wirzenius: Obnam 1.12 released (backup software)

I have just released version 1.12 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what it does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable. The NEWS file extract below gives the highlights of what's new in this version. It includes the changes for version 1.11, which was a bug fix for 1.10 and not announced separately. Version 1.12, released 2015-07-08 Bug fixes: Improvements: Version 1.11, released 2015-07-02

7 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 10 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Daniel Stender published an English translation of the article which originally appeared in Linux Magazin in Admin Magazine. Toolchain fixes Fixes landed in the Debian archive: Lunar submitted to Debian the patch already sent upstream adding a --clamp-mtime option to tar. Patches have been submitted to add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to txt2man (Reiner Herrmann), epydoc (Reiner Herrmann), GCC (Dhole), and Doxygen (akira). Dhole uploaded a new experimental debhelper to the reproducible repository which exports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. As part of the experiment, the patch also sets TZ to UTC which should help with most timezone issues. It might still be problematic for some packages which would change their settings based on this. Mattia Rizzolo sent upstream a patch originally written by Lunar to make the generate-id() function be deterministic in libxslt. While that patch was quickly rejected by upstream, Andrew Ayer came up with a much better one which sadly could have some performance impact. Daniel Veillard replied with another patch that should be deterministic in most cases without needing extra data structures. It's impact is currently being investigated by retesting packages on reproducible.debian.net. akira added a new option to sbuild for configuring the path in which packages are built. This will be needed for the srebuild script. Niko Tyni asked Perl upstream about it using the __DATE__ and __TIME__ C processor macros. Packages fixed The following 143 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: alot, argvalidate, astroquery, blender, bpython, brian, calibre, cfourcc, chaussette, checkbox-ng, cloc, configshell, daisy-player, dipy, dnsruby, dput-ng, dsc-statistics, eliom, emacspeak, freeipmi, geant321, gpick, grapefruit, heat-cfntools, imagetooth, jansson, jmapviewer, lava-tool, libhtml-lint-perl, libtime-y2038-perl, lift, lua-ldoc, luarocks, mailman-api, matroxset, maven-hpi-plugin, mknbi, mpi4py, mpmath, msnlib, munkres, musicbrainzngs, nova, pecomato, pgrouting, pngcheck, powerline, profitbricks-client, pyepr, pylibssh2, pylogsparser, pystemmer, pytest, python-amqp, python-apt, python-carrot, python-crypto, python-darts.lib.utils.lru, python-demgengeo, python-graph, python-mock, python-musicbrainz2, python-pathtools, python-pskc, python-psutil, python-pypump, python-repoze.sphinx.autointerface, python-repoze.tm2, python-repoze.what-plugins, python-repoze.what, python-repoze.who-plugins, python-xstatic-term.js, reclass, resource-agents, rgain, rttool, ruby-aggregate, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bcat, ruby-blankslate, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-colored, ruby-dbd-mysql, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-dbd-sqlite3, ruby-dbi, ruby-dirty-memoize, ruby-encryptor, ruby-erubis, ruby-fast-xs, ruby-fusefs, ruby-gd, ruby-git, ruby-globalhotkeys, ruby-god, ruby-hike, ruby-hmac, ruby-integration, ruby-ipaddress, ruby-jnunemaker-matchy, ruby-memoize, ruby-merb-core, ruby-merb-haml, ruby-merb-helpers, ruby-metaid, ruby-mina, ruby-net-irc, ruby-net-netrc, ruby-odbc, ruby-packet, ruby-parseconfig, ruby-platform, ruby-plist, ruby-popen4, ruby-rchardet, ruby-romkan, ruby-rubyforge, ruby-rubytorrent, ruby-samuel, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-sourcify, ruby-test-spec, ruby-validatable, ruby-wirble, ruby-xml-simple, ruby-zoom, ryu, simplejson, spamassassin-heatu, speaklater, stompserver, syncevolution, syncmaildir, thin, ticgit, tox, transmissionrpc, vdr-plugin-xine, waitress, whereami, xlsx2csv, zathura. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new package set for the X Strike Force has been added. (h01ger) Bugs tagged with locale are now visible in the statistics. (h01ger) Some work has been done add tests for NetBSD. (h01ger) Many changes by Mattia Rizzolo have been merged on the whole infrastructure: debbindiff development Version 26 has been released on June 28th fixing the comparison of files of unknown format. (Lunar) A missing dependency identified in python-rpm affecting debbindiff installation without recommended packages was promptly fixed by Michal iha . Lunar also started a massive code rearchitecture to enhance code reuse and enable new features. Nothing visible yet, though. Documentation update josch and Mattia Rizzolo documented how to reschedule packages from Alioth. Package reviews 142 obsolete reviews have been removed, 344 added and 107 updated this week. Chris West (Faux) filled 13 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources. The following new issues have been added: snapshot_placeholder_replaced_with_timestamp_in_pom_properties, different_encoding, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode and timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_matplotlib.

Petter Reinholdtsen: MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use

After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) why they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with the MPEG LA, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it does not. I started by asking for more information about the various licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
According to a MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02, there is no charge when using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me. What exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not? The only source of more information I have been able to find is a PDF named AVC Patent Portfolio License Briefing, which states this about the fees:
  • Where End User pays for AVC Video
    • Subscription (not limited by title) 100,000 or fewer subscribers/yr = no royalty; > 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr = $25,000; >250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; >500,000 to 1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; >1M subscribers/yr = $100,000
    • Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; >12 minutes in length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title
  • Where remuneration is from other sources
    • Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for > 100,000 HH rising to maximum $10,000 for >1,000,000 HH
    • Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription) no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License
Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into one of the other three categories? Can you point me to a good source explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in the license terms for AVC/H.264? Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a "video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio license? Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get access to personalized services? Note, this request and all answers will be published on the Internet.
The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate with the MPEG LA:
Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA. We appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you. As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10). Specifically, coverage is provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264 technology. Accordingly, the party offering such end products and video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for paying the applicable royalties. Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over the Internet free-of-charge. Therefore, if a party offers a service which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC License. This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free AVC Video content. In other words, as long as the End User is given access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then no royalties would be payable under our AVC License. On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such video would constitute Subscription AVC Video. In cases where AVC Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video. If a party offers Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below. Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be subject to the applicable royalties. For your reference, I have attached a .pdf copy of the AVC License. You will find the relevant sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through 2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4. You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video, Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License. Please note that the electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot be used for execution. I hope the above information is helpful. If you have additional questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel free to contact me directly.
Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong. But I still had a few questions:
I have a small followup question. Would it be possible for me to get a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid? The reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA. The clauses typically look similar to this:
This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b) decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA. I suspect it will differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway. What is MPEG LAs view on this?
According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:
With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License reads: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC Product as their own branded AVC Product). Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were payable under the License. On the other hand, if that party (either a Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC Products by the licensed supplier. Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including Norway. I hope this clarification is helpful. If I may be of any further assistance, just let me know.
The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I asked for more information:
But one minor question at the end. If I understand you correctly, you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent Portfolio that are valid in Norway. This make me believe I read the list available from <URL: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx > incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi Electric Corporation expired in 2012. Which patents are you referring to that are relevant for Norway?
Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents in that list:
Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012. Therefore, where AVC Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License. With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before the last Norwegian AVC patent expired. I would also like to clarify that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents. Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example, Norway). Similarly, a party would need to conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.
As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because the patents are not valid in Norway?

6 July 2015

Matthew Garrett: Anti Evil Maid 2 Turbo Edition

The Evil Maid attack has been discussed for some time - in short, it's the idea that most security mechanisms on your laptop can be subverted if an attacker is able to gain physical access to your system (for instance, by pretending to be the maid in a hotel). Most disk encryption systems will fall prey to the attacker replacing the initial boot code of your system with something that records and then exfiltrates your decryption passphrase the next time you type it, at which point the attacker can simply steal your laptop the next day and get hold of all your data.

There are a couple of ways to protect against this, and they both involve the TPM. Trusted Platform Modules are small cryptographic devices on the system motherboard[1]. They have a bunch of Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs) that are cleared on power cycle but otherwise have slightly strange write semantics - attempting to write a new value to a PCR will append the new value to the existing value, take the SHA-1 of that and then store this SHA-1 in the register. During a normal boot, each stage of the boot process will take a SHA-1 of the next stage of the boot process and push that into the TPM, a process called "measurement". Each component is measured into a separate PCR - PCR0 contains the SHA-1 of the firmware itself, PCR1 contains the SHA-1 of the firmware configuration, PCR2 contains the SHA-1 of any option ROMs, PCR5 contains the SHA-1 of the bootloader and so on.

If any component is modified, the previous component will come up with a different measurement and the PCR value will be different, Because you can't directly modify PCR values[2], this modified code will only be able to set the PCR back to the "correct" value if it's able to generate a sequence of writes that will hash back to that value. SHA-1 isn't yet sufficiently broken for that to be practical, so we can probably ignore that. The neat bit here is that you can then use the TPM to encrypt small quantities of data[3] and ask it to only decrypt that data if the PCR values match. If you change the PCR values (by modifying the firmware, bootloader, kernel and so on), the TPM will refuse to decrypt the material.

Bitlocker uses this to encrypt the disk encryption key with the TPM. If the boot process has been tampered with, the TPM will refuse to hand over the key and your disk remains encrypted. This is an effective technical mechanism for protecting against people taking images of your hard drive, but it does have one fairly significant issue - in the default mode, your disk is decrypted automatically. You can add a password, but the obvious attack is then to modify the boot process such that a fake password prompt is presented and the malware exfiltrates the data. The TPM won't hand over the secret, so the malware flashes up a message saying that the system must be rebooted in order to finish installing updates, removes itself and leaves anyone except the most paranoid of users with the impression that nothing bad just happened. It's an improvement over the state of the art, but it's not a perfect one.

Joanna Rutkowska came up with the idea of Anti Evil Maid. This can take two slightly different forms. In both, a secret phrase is generated and encrypted with the TPM. In the first form, this is then stored on a USB stick. If the user suspects that their system has been tampered with, they boot from the USB stick. If the PCR values are good, the secret will be successfully decrypted and printed on the screen. The user verifies that the secret phrase is correct and reboots, satisfied that their system hasn't been tampered with. The downside to this approach is that most boots will not perform this verification, and so you rely on the user being able to make a reasonable judgement about whether it's necessary on a specific boot.

The second approach is to do this on every boot. The obvious problem here is that in this case an attacker simply boots your system, copies down the secret, modifies your system and simply prints the correct secret. To avoid this, the TPM can have a password set. If the user fails to enter the correct password, the TPM will refuse to decrypt the data. This can be attacked in a similar way to Bitlocker, but can be avoided with sufficient training: if the system reboots without the user seeing the secret, the user must assume that their system has been compromised and that an attacker now has a copy of their TPM password.

This isn't entirely great from a usability perspective. I think I've come up with something slightly nicer, and certainly more Web 2.0[4]. Anti Evil Maid relies on having a static secret because expecting a user to remember a dynamic one is pretty unreasonable. But most security conscious people rely on dynamic secret generation daily - it's the basis of most two factor authentication systems. TOTP is an algorithm that takes a seed, the time of day and some reasonably clever calculations and comes up with (usually) a six digit number. The secret is known by the device that you're authenticating against, and also by some other device that you possess (typically a phone). You type in the value that your phone gives you, the remote site confirms that it's the value it expected and you've just proven that you possess the secret. Because the secret depends on the time of day, someone copying that value won't be able to use it later.

But instead of using your phone to identify yourself to a remote computer, we can use the same technique to ensure that your computer possesses the same secret as your phone. If the PCR states are valid, the computer will be able to decrypt the TOTP secret and calculate the current value. This can then be printed on the screen and the user can compare it against their phone. If the values match, the PCR values are valid. If not, the system has been compromised. Because the value changes over time, merely booting your computer gives your attacker nothing - printing an old value won't fool the user[5]. This allows verification to be a normal part of every boot, without forcing the user to type in an additional password.

I've written a prototype implementation of this and uploaded it here. Do pay attention to the list of limitations - without a bootloader that measures your kernel and initrd, you're still open to compromise. Adding TPM support to grub is on my list of things to do. There are also various potential issues like an attacker being able to use external DMA-capable devices to obtain the secret, especially since most Linux distributions still ship kernels that don't enable the IOMMU by default. And, of course, if your firmware is inherently untrustworthy there's multiple ways it can subvert this all. So treat this very much like a research project rather than something you can depend on right now. There's a fair amount of work to do to turn this into a meaningful improvement in security.

[1] I wrote about them in more detail here, including a discussion of whether they can be used for general purpose DRM (answer: not really)

[2] In theory, anyway. In practice, TPMs are embedded devices running their own firmware, so who knows what bugs they're hiding.

[3] On the order of 128 bytes or so. If you want to encrypt larger things with a TPM, the usual way to do it is to generate an AES key, encrypt your material with that and then encrypt the AES key with the TPM.

[4] Is that even a thing these days? What do we say instead?

[5] Assuming that the user is sufficiently diligent in checking the value, anyway

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Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Apport Integration with Debian - GSoC Update

For this year's Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD. For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion. With this GSoC, Yuru has been bringing some of the missing integration pieces of Debian. For example, we are now using debianbts to to talk to the Debian BTS Server, and fetch bug reports for the user. While apport's Bug Report data collection itself is very comprehensive, still for Debian, it will have the option to use native as well as reportbug. This will allow us to use the many hooks people have integrated so far with reportbug. Both Bug Report data collectors will be available. Yuru has blogged about his GSoC progress so far, here. Please do have a read, and let us know your views. If the travel formalities work out well, I intend to attend Debconf this year, and can talk in more detail.

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5 July 2015

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in June 2015

FTP assistant This month I marked 539 packages for accept, rejected 61 of them and had to send 24 emails to maintainers. This is a new personal record. Even in the month before the Jessie freeze I accepted only 407 packages. So, very well done (self-laudation has to happen from time to time :-) ). Another record was broken as well. After 19 month of doing this kind of work, I got my first insulting email. I would prefer to wait another 19 month before I get the next one Squeeze LTS This was my twelfth month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month I got assigned a workload of only 14.5h and I spent most of it to work on a new upload of php5. Unfortunately there have been so many CVEs comming in, that I didn t do an upload yet. Other stuff I uploaded was This month I also had my first one and a half weeks of doing frontdesk work. As introduced in this email, every member of the LTS team should do some LTS CVE triage. Up to now it was mainly done by Raphael and he wants to share this task with everybody else. So I answered questions on the IRC channel, on the LTS list and looked for CVEs that are important for Squeeze LTS or could be ignored. Other stuff This month I also uploaded a new version of harminv and wondered why the package didn t move to testing. Of course there is a document how to do a transition of a library properly. But hey, it is me, I know everything better and of course I can use a shortcut. Oh boy, I was wrong. So I also uploaded new versions of meep, meep-lam4, meep-openmpi, meep-mpi-default and meep-mpich2. And the moral of the story: If you don t understand why something should be done in a specific way, you shouldn t try to do it different. Donations Again, thanks alot to all donors. I really appreciate this and hope that everybody is pleased with my commitment. Don t hesitate to make suggestions for improvements.

3 July 2015

Petter Reinholdtsen: Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years

My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a replacement soon. The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230 started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the flickering. My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is still as I described them in 2013. The last time I bought a laptop, I had good help from prisjakt.no where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin, wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually. Three button mouse and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and G2) lack three mouse buttons). It is also unclear to me how good the keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are. I hope Lenovo have not messed up the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have deteriorated since X41. I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options seem sensible to me? Are there better services around to search the set of available laptops for features? Please send me an email if you have suggestions.

2 July 2015

Simon Kainz: DUCK challenge at DebConf15

New features in DUCK Carnivore-* data DUCK now uses carnivore- names,email tables from UDD, giving a nice list of packages grouped by Maintainer/Uploader names. Domain grouping A per-domain-listing is now also available here. DUCK challenge at DebConf15 After announcing DUCK in mid-june 2012, the number of source packages with issues is still somewhat stable around 1700. After a recent update of the curl libs, i also managed to get rid of 200 false positives, caused by SSL-verification issues, as can be seen here. To speed things up a bit and lower the number of broken links, i hereby propose the following challenge: The first 99 persons who fix at least 1 broken URL and upload the fixed package before end of DebConf15 will get an awesome "200 OK" DUCK-branded lighter at DebConf15! Lighter Army of Lighters The challenge starts right now! I will try hard to not forget anyone who fixes packages (note the s ;-), but if you feel missed out, please contact me at DC15. Also, please remember that this is not a valid excuse to NMU packages ;-). su

Steve Kemp: My new fitness challenge

So recently I posted on twitter about a sudden gain in strength: To put that more into context I should give a few more details. In the past I've been using an assisted pull-up machine, which offers a counterweight to make such things easier. When I started the exercise I assumed I couldn't do it for real, so I used the machine and set it on 150lb. Over a few weeks I got as far as being able to use it with only 80lb. (Which means I was lifting my entire body-weight minus 80lb. With the assisted-pullup machine smaller numbers are best!) One evening I was walking to the cinema with my wife and told her I thought I'd be getting close to doing one real pull-up soon, which sounds a little silly, but I guess is pretty common for random men who are 40 as I almost am. As it happens there were some climbing equipment nearby so I said "Here see how close I am", and I proceeded to do 1.5 pullups. (The second one was bad, and didn't count, as I got 90% of the way "up".) Having had that success I knew I could do "almost two", and I set a goal for the next gym visit: 3 x 3-pullups. I did that. Then I did two more for fun on the way out (couldn't quite manage a complete set.) So that's the story of how I went from doing 1.5 pullus to doing 11 in less than a week. These days I can easily do 3x3, but struggle with more. It'll come, slowly.
So pull-up vs. chin-up? This just relates to which way you place your hands: palm facing you (chin-up) and palm way from you (pull-up). Some technical details here but chinups are easier, and more bicep-centric.
Anyway too much writing. My next challenge is the one-armed pushup. However long it takes, and I think it will take a while, that's what I'm working toward.

1 July 2015

Daniel Silverstone: Be careful what you ask for

Date: Wed, 01 Jul 2015 06:13:16 -0000
From: 123-reg <noreply@123-reg.co.uk>
To: dsilvers@digital-scurf.org
Subject: Tell us what you think for your chance to win
X-Mailer: MIME::Lite 3.027 (F2.74; T1.28; A2.04; B3.13; Q3.13)
Tell us what you think of 123-reg!
<!--
.style1  color: #1996d8 
-->
Well 123-reg mostly I think you don't know how to do email.

29 June 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 9 in Stretch cycle

What happened about the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes Norbert Preining uploaded texinfo/6.0.0.dfsg.1-2 which makes texinfo indices reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb. Lunar submitted recently rebased patches to make the file order of files inside .deb stable. akira filled #789843 to make tex4ht stop printing timestamps in its HTML output by default. Dhole wrote a patch for xutils-dev to prevent timestamps when creating gzip compresed files. Reiner Herrmann sent a follow-up patch for wheel to use UTC as timezone when outputing timestamps. Mattia Rizzolo started a discussion regarding the failure to build from source of subversion when -Wdate-time is added to CPPFLAGS which happens when asking dpkg-buildflags to use the reproducible profile. SWIG errors out because it doesn't recognize the aforementioned flag. Trying to get the .buildinfo specification to more definitive state, Lunar started a discussion on storing the checksums of the binary package used in dpkg status database. akira discovered while proposing a fix for simgrid that CMake internal command to create tarballs would record a timestamp in the gzip header. A way to prevent it is to use the GZIP environment variable to ask gzip not to store timestamps, but this will soon become unsupported. It's up for discussion if the best place to fix the problem would be to fix it for all CMake users at once. Infrastructure-related work Andreas Henriksson did a delayed NMU upload of pbuilder which adds minimal support for build profiles and includes several fixes from Mattia Rizzolo affecting reproducibility tests. Neils Thykier uploaded lintian which both raises the severity of package-contains-timestamped-gzip and avoids false positives for this tag (thanks to Tomasz Buchert). Petter Reinholdtsen filled #789761 suggesting that how-can-i-help should prompt its users about fixing reproducibility issues. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: autorun4linuxcd, libwildmagic, lifelines, plexus-i18n, texlive-base, texlive-extra, texlive-lang. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Untested uploaded as they are not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: debbindiff development debbindiff/23 includes a few bugfixes by Helmut Grohne that result in a significant speedup (especially on larger files). It used to exhibit the quadratic time string concatenation antipattern. Version 24 was released on June 23rd in a hurry to fix an undefined variable introduced in the previous version. (Reiner Herrmann) debbindiff now has a test suite! It is written using the PyTest framework (thanks Isis Lovecruft for the suggestion). The current focus has been on the comparators, and we are now at 93% of code coverage for these modules. Several problems were identified and fixed in the process: paths appearing in output of javap, readelf, objdump, zipinfo, unsqusahfs; useless MD5 checksum and last modified date in javap output; bad handling of charsets in PO files; the destination path for gzip compressed files not ending in .gz; only metadata of cpio archives were actually compared. stat output was further trimmed to make directory comparison more useful. Having the test suite enabled a refactoring of how comparators were written, switching from a forest of differences to a single tree. This helped removing dust from the oldest parts of the code. Together with some other small changes, version 25 was released on June 27th. A follow up release was made the next day to fix a hole in the test suite and the resulting unidentified leftover from the comparator refactoring. (Lunar) Documentation update Ximin Luo improved code examples for some proposed environment variables for reference timestamps. Dhole added an example on how to fix timestamps C pre-processor macros by adding a way to set the build date externally. akira documented her fix for tex4ht timestamps. Package reviews 94 obsolete reviews have been removed, 330 added and 153 updated this week. Hats off for Chris West (Faux) who investigated many fail to build from source issues and reported the relevant bugs. Slight improvements were made to the scripts for editing the review database, edit-notes and clean-notes. (Mattia Rizzolo) Meetings A meeting was held on June 23rd. Minutes are available. The next meeting will happen on Tuesday 2015-07-07 at 17:00 UTC. Misc. The Linux Foundation announced that it was funding the work of Lunar and h01ger on reproducible builds in Debian and other distributions. This was further relayed in a Bits from Debian blog post.

Paul Wise: The aliens are amongst us!

Don't worry, they can't cope with our atmosphere. Alien on the ground Perhaps they are just playing dead. Don't turn your back if you see one. Folks may want to use this alien in free software. The original photo is available on request. To the extent possible under law, I have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. The alien has signed a model release. An email or a link to this page would be appreciated though.

24 June 2015

Norbert Preining: TeX Live Manager News June 2015

TeX Live 2015 has been released, and normal operation with daily updates has started. During the freeze time and afterwards I have made a few changes to the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) that I want to highlight here. texlive-tlmgr The main changes are better error and return code handling (which should be hardly visible for the users), and more more informative output of the tlmgr info action, incorporating more data from the TeX Catalogue. Error handling With a program that started as an experiment that has grown into the central configuration and management program, there are lots of old code pieces that did not do proper error signaling via return values. That meant that the return value of a tlmgr run didn t have any meaning, mostly because it was 0 (success) most of the times. I have now tried to do proper return code handling throughout the tlmgr code base, that is the tlmgr.pl and the necessary Perl modules. While this should not be a user visible changes, it turned out that the MacOS TeX Live Utility by Adam Maxwell (btw, a great program, it would be nice to have something similar written for Unix replacing the bit clumsy tlmgr gui), got broken for paper configuration, due to forgotten return value fixes in the TLPaper.pm module. That is fixed now in our repository. All in all we do hope that the return value of a tlmgr run now gives proper information about success or error. I might add a bit more semantics by returning bit-values in case of errors, but this is in early stages of thinking. TeX Catalogue data in tlmgr info Since more or less the very beginning we incorporated information from the TeX Catalogue into our database. In particular did we carry over the license information, version, CTAN directory, and date of last change of information in the Catalogue. ctan-page-asana-mathRecently (or not so recently, I actually don t know), CTAN has enriched their package view with more information, in particular a list of topics, and a list of related packages. Take for example the Asana-math package. It s CTAN page now displays besides the previously available information also a list of topics and a list of related packages. The topic index can also be browsed directly when searching for a specific package. I have now added functionality in the TeX Live Manager that tlmgr info also prints out the topic names and related packages. In the case of Asana Math fonts, that would look like: 
$ tlmgr info Asana-Math
package:     Asana-Math
category:    Package
shortdesc:   A font to typeset maths in Xe(La)TeX and Lua(La)TeX.
longdesc:    The Asana-Math font is an OpenType font that includes almost all mathematical Unicode symbols and it can be used to typeset mathematical text with any software that can understand the MATH OpenType table (e.g., XeTeX 0.997 and Microsoft Word 2007). The font is beta software. Typesetting support for use with LaTeX is provided by the fontspec and unicode-math packages.
installed:   Yes
revision:    37556
sizes:       doc: 9k, run: 1177k
relocatable: No
cat-version: 000.955
cat-date:    2015-06-02 20:04:19 +0200
cat-license: ofl
cat-topics:  font font-maths font-otf font-ttf
cat-related: stix xits
collection:  collection-fontsextra
GUIs could use the topic names and related packages to link directly to the CTAN page. At the moment the related packages are named according to CTAN standards, which are a bit different from what we use in TeX Live. I am not sure whether I will change that, or ship out both names. We will see.
The changes are currently in testing, see section about Test version here, and will be pushed out in due time, probably in the next week. As usual, in case of any problems or bugs, please contact us at the TeX Live mailing list. Enjoy.

23 June 2015

Ben Armstrong: Debian Live Rescue needs some love

You may have noticed that Jessie no longer includes the useful rescue flavour of live image, formerly included in Wheezy and earlier releases, and neither will Stretch unless you take action. This is my second public call for help this year to revive it. So if you care about rescue, here s how you can help: If you have any questions not answered in this post, please feel free to leave a comment on this blog, talk to the Debian Live team on irc I m SynrG, and hang out with the team at #debian-live @ irc.oftc.net) or drop us an email at debian-live@lists.debian.org.

Russell Coker: One Android Phone Per Child

I was asked for advice on whether children should have access to smart phones, it s an issue that many people are discussing and seems worthy of a blog post. Claimed Problems with Smart Phones The first thing that I think people should read is this XKCD post with quotes about the demise of letter writing from 99+ years ago [1]. Given the lack of evidence cited by people who oppose phone use I think we should consider to what extent the current concerns about smart phone use are just reactions to changes in society. I ve done some web searching for reasons that people give for opposing smart phone use by kids and addressed the issues below. Some people claim that children shouldn t get a phone when they are so young that it will just be a toy. That s interesting given the dramatic increase in the amount of money spent on toys for children in recent times. It s particularly interesting when parents buy game consoles for their children but refuse mobile phone toys (I know someone who did this). I think this is more of a social issue regarding what is a suitable toy than any real objection to phones used as toys. Obviously the educational potential of a mobile phone is much greater than that of a game console. It s often claimed that kids should spend their time reading books instead of using phones. When visiting libraries I ve observed kids using phones to store lists of books that they want to read, this seems to discredit that theory. Also some libraries have Android and iOS apps for searching their catalogs. There are a variety of apps for reading eBooks, some of which have access to many free books but I don t expect many people to read novels on a phone. Cyber-bullying is the subject of a lot of anxiety in the media. At least with cyber-bullying there s an electronic trail, anyone who suspects that their child is being cyber-bullied can check that while old-fashioned bullying is more difficult to track down. Also while cyber-bullying can happen faster on smart phones the victim can also be harassed on a PC. I don t think that waiting to use a PC and learn what nasty thing people are saying about you is going to be much better than getting an instant notification on a smart phone. It seems to me that the main disadvantage of smart phones in regard to cyber-bullying is that it s easier for a child to participate in bullying if they have such a device. As most parents don t seem concerned that their child might be a bully (unfortunately many parents think it s a good thing) this doesn t seem like a logical objection. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is claimed to be a problem, apparently if a child has a phone then they will want to take it to bed with them and that would be a bad thing. But parents could have a policy about when phones may be used and insist that a phone not be taken into the bedroom. If it s impossible for a child to own a phone without taking it to bed then the parents are probably dealing with other problems. I m not convinced that a phone in bed is necessarily a bad thing anyway, a phone can be used as an alarm clock and instant-message notifications can be turned off at night. When I was young I used to wait until my parents were asleep before getting out of bed to use my PC, so if smart-phones were available when I was young it wouldn t have changed my night-time computer use. Some people complain that kids might use phones to play games too much or talk to their friends too much. What do people expect kids to do? In recent times the fear of abduction has led to children doing playing outside a lot less, it used to be that 6yos would play with other kids in their street and 9yos would be allowed to walk to the local park. Now people aren t allowing 14yo kids walk to the nearest park alone. Playing games and socialising with other kids has to be done over the Internet because kids aren t often allowed out of the house. Play and socialising are important learning experiences that have to happen online if they can t happen offline. Apps can be expensive. But it s optional to sign up for a credit card with the Google Play store and the range of free apps is really good. Also the default configuration of the app store is to require a password entry before every purchase. Finally it is possible to give kids pre-paid credit cards and let them pay for their own stuff, such pre-paid cards are sold at Australian post offices and I m sure that most first-world countries have similar facilities. Electronic communication is claimed to be somehow different and lesser than old-fashioned communication. I presume that people made the same claims about the telephone when it first became popular. The only real difference between email and posted letters is that email tends to be shorter because the reply time is smaller, you can reply to any questions in the same day not wait a week for a response so it makes sense to expect questions rather than covering all possibilities in the first email. If it s a good thing to have longer forms of communication then a smart phone with a big screen would be a better option than a feature phone , and if face to face communication is preferred then a smart phone with video-call access would be the way to go (better even than old fashioned telephony). Real Problems with Smart Phones The majority opinion among everyone who matters (parents, teachers, and police) seems to be that crime at school isn t important. Many crimes that would result in jail sentences if committed by adults receive either no punishment or something trivial (such as lunchtime detention) if committed by school kids. Introducing items that are both intrinsically valuable and which have personal value due to the data storage into a typical school environment is probably going to increase the amount of crime. The best options to deal with this problem are to prevent kids from taking phones to school or to home-school kids. Fixing the crime problem at typical schools isn t a viable option. Bills can potentially be unexpectedly large due to kids inability to restrain their usage and telcos deliberately making their plans tricky to profit from excess usage fees. The solution is to only use pre-paid plans, fortunately many companies offer good deals for pre-paid use. In Australia Aldi sells pre-paid credit in $15 increments that lasts a year [2]. So it s possible to pay $15 per year for a child s phone use, have them use Wifi for data access and pay from their own money if they make excessive calls. For older kids who need data access when they aren t at home or near their parents there are other pre-paid phone companies that offer good deals, I ve previously compared prices of telcos in Australia, some of those telcos should do [3]. It s expensive to buy phones. The solution to this is to not buy new phones for kids, give them an old phone that was used by an older relative or buy an old phone on ebay. Also let kids petition wealthy relatives for a phone as a birthday present. If grandparents want to buy the latest smart-phone for a 7yo then there s no reason to stop them IMHO (this isn t a hypothetical situation). Kids can be irresponsible and lose or break their phone. But the way kids learn to act responsibly is by practice. If they break a good phone and get a lesser phone as a replacement or have to keep using a broken phone then it s a learning experience. A friend s son head-butted his phone and cracked the screen he used it for 6 months after that, I think he learned from that experience. I think that kids should learn to be responsible with a phone several years before they are allowed to get a learner s permit to drive a car on public roads, which means that they should have their own phone when they are 12. I ve seen an article about a school finding that tablets didn t work as well as laptops which was touted as news. Laptops or desktop PCs obviously work best for typing. Tablets are for situations where a laptop isn t convenient and when the usage involves mostly reading/watching, I ve seen school kids using tablets on excursions which seems like a good use of them. Phones are even less suited to writing than tablets. This isn t a problem for phone use, you just need to use the right device for each task. Phones vs Tablets Some people think that a tablet is somehow different from a phone. I ve just read an article by a parent who proudly described their policy of buying feature phones for their children and tablets for them to do homework etc. Really a phone is just a smaller tablet, once you have decided to buy a tablet the choice to buy a smart phone is just about whether you want a smaller version of what you have already got. The iPad doesn t appear to be able to make phone calls (but it supports many different VOIP and video-conferencing apps) so that could technically be described as a difference. AFAIK all Android tablets that support 3G networking also support making and receiving phone calls if you have a SIM installed. It is awkward to use a tablet to make phone calls but most usage of a modern phone is as an ultra portable computer not as a telephone. The phone vs tablet issue doesn t seem to be about the capabilities of the device. It s about how portable the device should be and the image of the device. I think that if a tablet is good then a more portable computing device can only be better (at least when you need greater portability). Recently I ve been carrying a 10 tablet around a lot for work, sometimes a tablet will do for emergency work when a phone is too small and a laptop is too heavy. Even though tablets are thin and light it s still inconvenient to carry, the issue of size and weight is a greater problem for kids. 7 tablets are a lot smaller and lighter, but that s getting close to a 5 phone. Benefits of Smart Phones Using a smart phone is good for teaching children dexterity. It can also be used for teaching art in situations where more traditional art forms such as finger painting aren t possible (I have met a professional artist who has used a Samsung Galaxy Note phone for creating art work). There is a huge range of educational apps for smart phones. The Wikireader (that I reviewed 4 years ago) [4] has obvious educational benefits. But a phone with Internet access (either 3G or Wifi) gives Wikipedia access including all pictures and is a better fit for most pockets. There are lots of educational web sites and random web sites that can be used for education (Googling the answer to random questions). When it comes to preparing kids for the real world or the work environment people often claim that kids need to use Microsoft software because most companies do (regardless of the fact that most companies will be using radically different versions of MS software by the time current school kids graduate from university). In my typical work environment I m expected to be able to find the answer to all sorts of random work-related questions at any time and I think that many careers have similar expectations. Being able to quickly look things up on a phone is a real work skill, and a skill that s going to last a lot longer than knowing today s version of MS-Office. There are a variety of apps for tracking phones. There are non-creepy ways of using such apps for monitoring kids. Also with two-way monitoring kids will know when their parents are about to collect them from an event and can stay inside until their parents are in the area. This combined with the phone/SMS functionality that is available on feature-phones provides some benefits for child safety. iOS vs Android Rumour has it that iOS is better than Android for kids diagnosed with Low Functioning Autism. There are apparently apps that help non-verbal kids communicate with icons and for arranging schedules for kids who have difficulty with changes to plans. I don t know anyone who has a LFA child so I haven t had any reason to investigate such things. Anyone can visit an Apple store and a Samsung Experience store as they have phones and tablets you can use to test out the apps (at least the ones with free versions). As an aside the money the Australian government provides to assist Autistic children can be used to purchase a phone or tablet if a registered therapist signs a document declaring that it has a therapeutic benefit. I think that Android devices are generally better for educational purposes than iOS devices because Android is a less restrictive platform. On an Android device you can install apps downloaded from a web site or from a 3rd party app download service. Even if you stick to the Google Play store there s a wider range of apps to choose from because Google is apparently less restrictive. Android devices usually allow installation of a replacement OS. The Nexus devices are always unlocked and have a wide range of alternate OS images and the other commonly used devices can usually have an alternate OS installed. This allows kids who have the interest and technical skill to extensively customise their device and learn all about it s operation. iOS devices are designed to be sealed against the user. Admittedly there probably aren t many kids with the skill and desire to replace the OS on their phone, but I think it s good to have option. Android phones have a range of sizes and features while Apple only makes a few devices at any time and there s usually only a couple of different phones on sale. iPhones are also a lot smaller than most Android phones, according to my previous estimates of hand size the iPhone 5 would be a good tablet for a 3yo or good for side-grasp phone use for a 10yo [5]. The main benefits of a phone are for things other than making phone calls so generally the biggest phone that will fit in a pocket is the best choice. The tiny iPhones don t seem very suitable. Also buying one of each is a viable option. Conclusion I think that mobile phone ownership is good for almost all kids even from a very young age (there are many reports of kids learning to use phones and tablets before they learn to read). There are no real down-sides that I can find. I think that Android devices are generally a better option than iOS devices. But in the case of special needs kids there may be advantages to iOS.
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